Drew Barrymore: Daisies and Butterflies

Q: Do you confide in him?

A: No, I don't confide in him, or rely on him. Whenever I see him, it's a joy. Then, sometimes I don't see him for two days. It's easy and it has to be easy.

Q: Could you reach that kind of resolution with your mother, Jaid? She raised you, managed your early career. But there seems to be more distance now than with your father, who wasn't there at all.

A: Dealing with my dad is enough right now. I don't have to think about it. I'm at peace. I've got lots of things to think about, and [my mother and I] don't really think alike.

Q: So you and your mother revolve in your separate orbits and you are OK with that?

A: Thank you, that's it exactly.

Q: While you've not had a lead role in a big hit, you've also managed to steer clear of disasters--like Showgirls, where you were an early contender for the role of Nomi. You know, Showgirls screenwriter Joe Eszterhas has wondered how the film would have turned out if it had had a lead actress like you to bring the vulnerability and warmth that Jennifer Beats brought to Flashdance.

A: I appreciate that, coming from him. As one of my great mentors, Harvey Weinstein, always says, it begins with the writing. Writers create the whole thing. So coming from Joe, that's a high compliment.

Q: But by Eszterhas's own admission, Showgirls was one of the great film debacles in recent memory.

A: Yes, but because of the campiness, they got lucky. I'm into predictions, and [when I saw the film] I said, "This is going to be The Rocky Horror Picture Show of the '90s"--and not one month later, they started showing it at midnight moviehouses.

Q: Would it have been different if you'd been Nomi?

A: They put an homage to me in that movie, did you know that? Nomi goes to her mirror when she first becomes a showgirl, and it says "Drew" on it, and she takes the name off. Now, that's the way I wanted to be in that movie.

Q: Showgirls dates back to your stripper phase, when you used to get up on tables in bars and shed your clothes. Is that what made you want to star in that film?

A: I really did entertain the idea of doing Showgirls. It was at a time where I was finding strip dubs incredibly interesting--vulnerable, shady, strange in the weirdest of ways. I was being free and having fun in this great rock-and-roll world. A perfect time in my life. I posed in Playboy. What I saw in Showgirls was that it could be All That Jazz, one of my favorite movies growing up, or Lenny. That strip scene with Valerie Perrine in Lenny is one of the sexiest scenes I've ever seen in my life and you don't see one nipple. I thought it would be somewhere in that vein. When I realized it was going to go a different way, I decided it wouldn't be the right movie. I couldn't offer what this movie needed because I would have played it vulnerable.

Q: Were you breathing a sigh of relief when you saw Showgirls?

A: Well, I was glad I didn't do it because I was glad it was the way it was. I enjoyed it the way it was. I dig the film.

Q: Who are the women you admire in Hollywood?

A: There are tons. Women are so in their sync. I have always respected Jodie Foster. She's a true leader to women and someone I grew up worshiping as an actor. I've never followed in her footsteps, but I always admire what she says and how she's remained so classy. I love my friend Courtney Love, because she's this fabulous, cultural phenomenon who's still a human being. Patricia Arquette is my absolute favorite actress. Her family lived nearby when I was a kid and I used to see her in the early to mid '80s, going around with painted mustaches on her face, wearing glitter platforms and crazy colored tights. She was so glammed out in the coolest, most individualistic way. She's always been a hero of mine. I just want to work with her so badly. I like her because she's sexy, vulnerable and truthful. Jennifer Jason Leigh is the same way.

Q: Do you have a big ego?

A: One of the things I learned in therapy is not to be untrusting of things that come to me. To trust myself that I might have done something that brought that good fortune. I am so shocked and surprised, and I say every night, how well things are going. But I know what it's like when it gets taken away, and that makes me not have an ego. Because you don't get to sit on some diamond mushroom every day. Life isn't like that. It's ups and downs. I'm terrified of ego, and the preventative is knowing that I've done this my whole life, and if a big splash came, it's not like, Omigod, my life will be different. It's more like, Hey, it's always been like this.

Q: You and Courtney Love have in common the rare achievement of being perceived one way, then reinventing yourselves.

A: She and I worship butterflies, that drag queen metamorphosis. Madonna was always exciting to little girls when I was growing up because she changed her look every month. It's not an exterior shallow thing, it's literally a reinvention of yourself. I think that's far more wonderful than relying on how wonderful you are all the time and never changing.

Q: You're 23 and seem to have been around 30 years. How have you kept audiences and the press from turning on you?

A: That's great if they still like me. I don't know the answer. The only thing I can think is there will never be a tidal wave of glory for me. I pray to be like the ocean, with soft currents, maybe waves at times. More and more, I want the consistency rather than the highs and the lows. I don't need to be high profile. What I want to do most is continue to work because I'm very happy when I'm working. I love being an employee.

Q: Looking ahead five years, do you want to be the actress who gets the best scripts first, or do you want to be a director, or do you want to be living on a ranch in Texas, raising kids?

A: I go back and forth. In five years, I really want to be a more enlightened hippie living in Texas, at least half of me does. The other half would go nuts and really wants to play the game. Directing is exactly where I want to go next. I don't sit there and masturbatorily talk about it, because when I do it, I'll do it.

Q: It's hard to imagine you moving away and not living here. Could you really leave all this behind?

A: I don't know, this has always been my base, my one form of consistency. I've always lived here. I still live in the neighborhood [I grew up in].

Q: So much has been written about your wild periods, the stripping, the infatuation with lesbianism...

A: It's all been done, so who cares ...

Q: Yes, but you seem well balanced now. There must be some secret vice.

A: There is. I'm a closet rave music fanatic, I swear to God. I don't go to raves, but I want to. It could be 3:00 in the afternoon, I'm driving in my Volkswagen bus, listening to Daft Punk, and everything's OK. That's my own little rave machine. It's not slam dance and mosh pits, but it's club music, acid, funk, psychedelic, hip-hop instrumental. I'm obsessed with it. And with my CD walkman, I'm walking down the street, bopping around listening to Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and my all-time favorite, the Beatles, and no one else is hearing it. It's like a drug, it enhances life.

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